Abstract
In rural China, the problems of declining young labor force and land abandonment are increasingly becoming serious. At the Third Plenary Session of the Seventeenth Central Committee in 2008, the Communist Party of China decided to reform the rural land system and comprehensively promote rural land circulation. Most of the circulation between farmers takes place because of migrant workers, not the land scale management needs. The farmers lend their
farmlands to those who stay in village temporarily, when the farmlands are deserted. This is called “Temporary Land Rentals.”
This article examined the factors related to “Temporary Land Rentals” by analyzing the survey data from the rural Hunan province. First, the Cobb-Douglas production function model was used to determine that the scale economy of rice production based on investment does not exist in this area. Second, binary logit model was used to conclude that social factors such as “expressive ties” and “instrumental ties” are the most important factors in the promotion of land circulation between the farmers in rural China at present. In the absence of land demand in traditional rural areas, borrowing land is considered as a burden but strength of “expressive ties.” While in more modern rural areas, land rental plays a positive role in establishing and accumulating “instrumental ties.”
